JetBrains' AI Assistant becomes fastest-growing product in 24 years

JetBrains, the company behind popular developer tools like PyCharm and IntelliJ IDEA used by over 15 million engineers, is finding that injecting generative AI directly into the development environment isn’t just a novelty—it’s a seismic shift in workflow. The company’s AI Assistant, built using OpenAI’s API, has officially become the fastest-growing product in JetBrains’ 24-year history.

The internal metrics are eye-opening. A full 77% of developers surveyed reported feeling more productive, a figure that’s backed up by a separate finding that 71% are completing tasks more quickly. But the number that stands out to me is the 78% who say they’re spending less time searching for information. That’s the mundane, context-switching death-by-a-thousand-cuts that really grinds engineering momentum to a halt. One veteran developer put it bluntly in the survey: “I’ve been a developer for 30 years. I can’t think of anything that has provided a bigger productivity boost than JetBrains AI Assistant.”

JetBrains didn’t just blindly plug in the first LLM they found. Vladislav Tankov, Team Lead of JetBrains AI, emphasized that the decision to go with OpenAI came down to a mix of advanced reasoning capabilities and surprisingly granular technical support. “We worked with developers who really care about what we create and how we create it,” he said. That level of partnership proved crucial when the team hit snags during integration. On the technical side, OpenAI won out on the cold, hard criteria that actually matter for an IDE plugin: latency, accuracy, and throughput. Nobody wants an AI pair programmer that makes them wait.

The feature set goes well beyond basic autocomplete. The assistant can generate entire test suites, explain unfamiliar code, refactor messy snippets, and even write commit messages—the kind of housekeeping tasks that eat up mental energy. One engineer highlighted how the tool combats a very specific developer pain: imposter syndrome. “I love it. It helps with imposter syndrome because you can just ask the LLM for help.” Looking ahead, JetBrains is prototyping project structure generation from text prompts and tighter integration with its existing code insight engine, hinting that the current product is just a rough draft of what’s coming.